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Theater in Athenian Society
The origins of the first dramatic production remain uncertain. One theory states that drama came out of ritualistic performances with religious and mythological themes that may have derived from Minoan society in the mid-second millennium B.C. Others attribute the origins of drama to sixth-century-B.C. Dorian Greece.
The performances took place at the City Dionysia, a theatrical festival in honor of Dionysus that held great cultural and religious significance for Athenians. The festivals were three-day affairs in which three playwrights were chosen to compete. Each playwright composed three tragedies, usually with a connecting theme, and also a satyr play—a burlesque piece in which actors dressed up as satyrs (men with the legs and tail of goats) and mocked the preceding action or other social issues to lighten the mood. The festivals also contained comedies and musical performances. At the end of the festival, a group of citizens chose the winning dramatist, who received an ivy crown. Aeschylus won 13 victories while he was alive and garnered more following his death, Sophocles won 24, and Euripides won five.
The Athenians believed that the City Dionysia provided an essential component of civic unity and that it provided the citizens with a catharsis, a chance to release powerful emotions through experiencing the suffering or happiness of others. The festival retained its religious aspects. The performances took place in front of a statue of Dionysus, and the chief spectator at those performances was the priest of Dionysus, who sat alongside other priests and city officials right next to the orchestra in special section called the prohedria ("front-seating"). The festival was an important political forum as well. The 10 strategoi, the highest officials in Athens, would make a libation, or wine offering, on behalf of the city. Distinguished benefactors of Athens were honored with gold crowns. During the Peloponnesian War, the sons of slain soldiers received their fathers' armor at the festival.
The City Dionysia took place at the Theater of Dionysus on the southeast slope of the Acropolis. The theater contained many of the elements that became common in theaters around the world: the orchestra, the semicircular stage on which the actors sang and danced; the theatron, the area where the audience sat and watched the performance; the skene, a wooden construction, sometimes decorated, in front of which the actors performed; the parodos, the gangway to the orchestra by which the actors made their entrance; and the mechane, a kind of crane that could hoist characters into the air to simulate flight. The mechane gave rise to the Latin expression "deus ex machina," or "god from the machine," that referred to a plot device in which a god swooped down onto the stage to resolve plot difficulties. The actors in Greek drama were all men, although they frequently performed female roles. While on stage, the actors wore masks to distinguish the characters more clearly for the audience.
The Theater of Dionysus held as many as 17,000 spectators at its peak capacity in the fourth century B.C. Greek theaters were built on the sides of hills in the open air, providing striking backgrounds of natural scenery. Surviving Greek theaters, including those theaters at Epidaurus and Syracuse, offer some of the most impressive built remains of Greek civilization.
Tragedy
Tragedy, the central dramatic component for Athenian audiences, is thought to derive from the Greek words tragos and aeidein, meaning "goat-song." Some scholars have suggested that reference because sacrificial goats were awarded to winners of choral competitions in archaic Greece. Others have suggested that adolescent men who sang in those choruses made a bleating sound similar to that of goats. Regardless of the origin of the term, it appears that those early choral events were held in honor of the god Dionysus.
Aristotle's Poetics suggests that tragedy evolved out of dithyrambs, choral songs and dances performed in honor of Dionysus. The choruses were made up of Athenian male citizens, for whom it was a public duty to perform. Aristotle stated that drama developed when the semilegendary sixth-century playwright Thespis added an actor called a "hypocrite" who responded to the chorus. That actor was called a hypocrite, meaning "answerer," because the character did not always do as he said. Aeschylus, the first great tragedian of the fifth century, advanced the genre by adding a second actor. Aeschylus' Persians, written around 472 B.C., was the first surviving play that employed two actors and a chorus.
During the fifth century B.C. when Greek tragedy peaked, nearly 300 tragedies were performed, of which only 32 have survived. Aeschylus was an enormously popular playwright who produced an estimated 90 plays during his career. His trilogy, the Oresteia, which is considered one of the great dramatic works of all time, is the only complete trilogy to survive from antiquity.
While Aristotle credits Aeschylus with adding a second actor, he states that tragedy did not reach its mature form until the work of Sophocles, who added a third actor. That "three-actor rule" was maintained for the rest of antiquity. Sophocles was the most successful tragedian of classical Greece. He wrote more than 120 plays and won 24 contests, often coming in second when he did not win. Sophocles' tragedies, including Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, and Philoctetes present heroes who stand rigidly by certain principles, even if that tenacity results in death or the deaths of those around them. [See related entries on Oedipus, Antigone, and Philoctetes.] For example, such characters as Oedipus in Oedipus the King frequently contended with the consequences of their actions, whether they were misguided by folly or pride.
Several key components characterized fifth-century Greek tragedy. A play generally opened with a prologue, where an actor delivered a monologue or two actors participated in a dialogue. The Greek chorus performed a song, contest, or debate illuminating the theme of the play. The Greek chorus then performed a parabasis, in which they would address the audience and perform a song unconnected to the overall plot of the play. The actors would again reenter to perform epeisodias, or episodes detailing separate scenes in the play. After the actors made their exit, the play ended with an epilogue delivered by one of the main actors. Euripides brought that format to fruition.
Euripides, the third great tragedian, wrote approximately 92 plays but won far fewer contests than either Aeschylus or Sophocles. His relative lack of success probably had less to do with his literary skill than with the often-disturbing or radical content of his plays. Modern readers view him as a great innovator of the stage, exploring variants of the standard mythological stories and sometimes choosing to tell the stories through lowly or morally suspect characters. In mythologically themed plays, an actor playing one of the gods often delivered the prologue or the epilogue. Moreover, his plays also rely far less on choral verses than the works of his predecessors did. That change is sometimes viewed as a trend of fifth-century drama toward individual actors driving the action of the play. Some of Euripides' masterpieces included Medea, Trojan Women, Hippolytus, Bacchants, and Iphigenia at Aulis. [See related entries on Medea and Iphigenia.] Of the surviving plays, Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote seven each, and the remaining 18 were by Euripides (a satyr play also survived written by Euripides.)
Comedy
Tragedy was the central component of Athenian dramatic festivals, but the audiences also appreciated the counterpoint of comedy that offered a chance to laugh after the heavy subjects of tragedy. Similar to tragedy, the origins of dramatic comedy remain uncertain. There were competitions in comedy from the very beginning of the City Dionysia, but ancient vases depicting humorous scenes suggest that a comic tradition could have developed far earlier. By the fifth century, comedies had developed a dramatic structure with actors and a chorus. The only fifth-century playwright whose complete comedies have survived is Aristophanes, whereas the fragmented work of other Greek comedians, including Cratinus and Eupolis, exists.
Aristophanes' comedies, of which 11 have survived, provide fascinating insights into ancient Athenian humor. Often, their sense of humor is not so different from modern citizens'; Aristophanes' plays abound in jokes about sex and bodily functions. He irreverently places representative members of Athenian society into preposterous situations and then uses them to mock the institutions of society and people who take themselves too seriously. His Knights is a scathing attack on Cleon, the warmongering demagogue of the Peloponnesian War. The Clouds ridicules Socrates as a corrupt teacher of rhetoric who spouts nonsense. His Lysistrata, which still amuses readers today, recounts a sex strike by the Spartan women and Athenian women that eventually compels the men to make peace. It is interesting to note the freedom of expression that Aristophanes must have enjoyed to have publicly ridiculed powerful public figures like Cleon.
Plays written during the fifth century B.C. were referred to as Old Comedy. Using the classic dramatic style, Old Comedies relied on alternating parts of dialogue and the Greek chorus. They often incorporated songs or dances performed by the chorus. Thematically, the plays sometimes offered reflections on the politics of the era. From around 400 B.C. to 320 B.C., Middle Comedies that often stressed social themes arose. No extant literature survived, however. Some comedic works, known as New Comedies have survived, including that of the fourth-century Athenian playwright Menander. New Comedies frequently addressed social themes incorporating such situational humor as mistaken identities or twins separated at birth. Contemporary familiarity with Menander's work has relied on the surviving Latin works that borrowed his themes.
Although Greek drama originated in Athens, in the following centuries, interest in those Athenian plays spread to other Greek cities, which built theaters of their own and sometimes performed Athenian dramatic works alongside their own choral and musical performances. The Romans, who conquered Greece in the second century B.C., became devotees of Greek culture. They built theaters throughout the Roman Republic and developed a Latin dramatic tradition that borrowed heavily from Greek models. Important Roman authors influenced by Greek drama included Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Plautus, Quintus Ennius, and Terence.
The Greek dramatic tradition dwindled in the later years of the Roman Empire and was almost forgotten through the Middle Ages. Enough copies of the ancient plays were preserved in the monasteries of Europe that when the Renaissance arrived the Greek theatrical tradition was able to be revived. Classical models heavily influenced such early modern playwrights as William Shakespeare, Jean Racine, and Moliére. The influence of Greek drama continues today. Looking at the corpus of theatrical words borrowed from the Greeks—thespian, orchestra, chorus, tragedy, comedy—it is easy to recognize the dramatic debt owed to fifth-century Athenians.
Further Reading
MLA Citation
"Greek drama." World History: Ancient and Medieval Eras.
Entry ID: 586554